Lately it seems that there has been a lot of discussion about the Google Library project that aims to digitize and index a lot of books. Yesterday there were two well written articles in the opinion section of the newspaper. The first article expounds on the virtues of the project and how it will bring the great literature of the world to a larger audience. The second article is from the point of view of an author who is saying that the whole idea would cut authors out of the royalties that they deserve.

I have to admit that I am torn about this whole idea. For novels and other articles I can see the Google argument that they would protect fair use by only allowing downloads of a few pages at a time so it would be impracticle for anyone to read a novel start to finish without being very good at guessing which search terms would bring up the next set of pages. For technical articles, however, I think that the damage would be huge. I read a lot of articles start to finish but I also spend a lot of time looking for specific answers. If the Google Library would allow me to read a paragraph or two that would answer my question then I don't need to buy an entire book. I think it would lead me to decide that I didn't need to buy the book because I could get the information on-line.

I have heard the argument that I could do the same thing at a book store or at the library but I don't think those arguments are valid for two reasons. The first reason is that unlike Google that gets revenue from advertising, neither the library nor book store make any money off of me because I entered their store. There is no company that is offering them money for "impressions" on the advertising that exist in the store windows. So even if I don't find what I am looking for Google can gain money off of the fact that I was even looking. The second reason is convenience. While there is a library just a few blocks from where I work it still represents several orders of magnitude more effort for me to physically go down to the library, look in the card catalog, find the book on the shelf, and puruse in it to find the information I am looking for, and to copy the information so I can take it back to work and use it there than it is to just use Google from the office. I am not a legal expert but I think this is equivalent to the protection given to people taping shows off of broadcast TV vs. the people downloading MP3s from illegal file sharing services. One is fair use and the other is not.

I have never been paid royalties for anything that I have written but I do sympathize with the authors. For most of the writing that I have done the hourly rate comes out to something well below minimum wage. I do it because I am interested in the topic and think I have something to say not for the money. One of these days I might decide to write a book or more likely an e-book that I self publish. If I do write a book I would hope that there would be a market beyond Google for it.

I think the easy way to solve the controversy is to either only index books that have no copyright protection on them or to secure the permission of the copyright holder first. If you only index old books it might reduce the relevancy of the searches for technical and timely ideas but would still preserve the great works of the past. By securing the copyright holder's permission Google could figure out a way to pay the holder of the copyright. Napster and iTunes are able to figure out a way to pay for music downloads so there should be a way for Google to pay for book downloads.